kll's blog

I'm pretty much a unix person at heart. I like most of the concepts that come with it, it's not like I care much about what kernel I use, Linux, FreeBSD whatever. What is nice though is the general concept of how you work and interact with a lot of the applications. Piping between processes in your shell or having that nice mark-some-text-with-your-mouse-to-copy is part of the things I just like with unix-style system.

Now, I'm forced to use windows occasionally (or quite a lot actually) as computers at work are WinXP and I do run a Win7 computer at home (together with a few Linux boxes).

A while ago I presented PyarrFS - a RAR reading file system, which allows the user to transparently read RAR files as if they were normal directories and files. The embarrassing part is that it was hardly functional thanks to non-existent support for the seek() call. The tests I did back then only tried reading the first few bytes of a file and if that succeeded all was good. Since the OS reads 4096 byte or so by the first read() call, no seeking was ever performed and I never noticed my fatal flaw until actually trying it out in real life...

A typical PyarrFS user exposing her satisfaction with said file system! (image courtesy of cafepress.com)

Tips & tricks when tcpdump:ing at high speeds... Ever experienced drop packets when trying to capture a stream of traffic using tcpdump? I know I have and it's quite annoying, isn't it? Here's a few tricks to keep those packets from hitting the floor.

I've always liked to see what the Internet looks like and preferably in a nice geographical map form. I've been pondering how to accomplish this and especially why no one else has. Lately my interest for this has increased to the level that I've decided to try and do something about it.

Lots of networks claim to be tier1 providers on the Internet today, Telia is among them. Wikipedia agrees with that, though as always with Wikipedia, it's not a primary source of information and so that page can easily be manipulated. During some recent network troubleshooting I looked into a few of their relations and found "evidence" pointing in another direction...

As your network grows, you are bound to get more configuration in your routers and to keep that very configuration uniform and in sync with some form of design rules will become all more important to maintain the quality of your network. In line of doing so JUNOS provides some great tools; first of is the apply-groups in where you can build a basic template of some configuration and then apply it under sections of your configuration...